Apocalypse Apartments for the Wealthy and Pessimistic

By

Adam Seessel

Aug. 23, 2019 7:35 pm ET

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Photograph by TJ Proechel

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Larry Hall took another bite of filet mignon, paused, and drank deeply from a margarita. It was a hot summer day, but it was cool inside the steakhouse in central Kansas. Hall, his wife, and his business associate were discussing one of their favorite subjects: how the world as we know it will end.

After some thought, Hall admitted that he couldn’t decide which was more likely: a cataclysmic meteor shower, a major earthquake, or an eruption from the dormant Yellowstone Megavolcano, which he said would drop four to six feet of ash across much of the continent. “I’d put my money on a solar flare,” said his project manager, Mark Menosky, between bites of his filet. “There’d be a huge electromagnetic pulse that would disable the backbone of the nation’s electrical grid, and it would take 12 to 18 months, in an ideal situation, to rebuild all our transformers. If there was a Carrington Event, that could take eight to 10 years to repair.”

“Have you heard of the Carrington Event?” Menosky asked. I had not, so he continued. “It was a powerful geomagnetic storm caused by a solar flare right before the Civil War,” he said. “All the telegraph lines burst into flames, and the prairies were set on fire.”

Hall’s wife, Lori, agreed with both men that the subsequent chaos that raged above ground would mean they would have to stay in their underground, nuclear-hardened bunker for two to three years. “By then, everyone outside will have starved,” Lori said.

Hall is founder and developer of the Survival Condo Project, a subterranean luxury condominium for high-net-worth individuals in Cloud County, Kan. During the Cold War, it was home to an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile. If disaster strikes, the silo will be home to 58 people who have both the money and the foresight to have planned for it. None of the residents agreed to be interviewed for this story, but Hall says most bought a unit for fear of a man-made cataclysm, such as climate change or a bioterrorism attack.

People like the Halls, Menosky, and their clients—those preparing for radically bad events, or “preppers” for short—are connoisseurs of catastrophe. Just as wine lovers love to swish the liquid around their mouths and debate the qualities of different vintages, preppers enjoy nothing so much as turning over the different ways in which the fake polite smiles of a civilized society could be wiped away to reveal a full set of canines.

There’s money in it, too: As the tail risks to a stable civilization grow—or as the perceptions of those risks grow—prepping is becoming a niche growth industry. It’s not as predictably lucrative as selling catastrophe-insurance policies like Warren Buffett, but
Costco
stocks a Mountain House 1-Year Food Storage kit that retails for $4,999.99. A California company, Vivos, has built a network of 575 underground shelters in South Dakota that, according to its website, is the largest survival community on Earth.

Vivos has also built a 300-person underground shelter in New Zealand, a popular end-of-the-world refuge among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who are disproportionately represented in the prepper demographic. It may be uncommon on the East Coast, but at cocktail parties in Silicon Valley, it is not unusual to hear people comparing end-of-the-world notes. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, says that more than half of all tech billionaires have some sort of apocalypse getaway. The CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, is an outspoken prepper, and while PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s New Zealand estate is above ground, he did have a panic room installed. Even Bill Gates is rumored to have bunkers underneath all of his many homes.

Preppers tend to be independent sorts, so getting a sense of their numbers is difficult. John Ogg, a journalist at 24/7 Wall Street, recently estimated the community at three to four million; although it’s just a guess, the figure gives new meaning to the expression “America’s 1%.”

Indeed, in this era of fragmentation, bracing for the end of the world is perhaps the only thing that unites rich coastal citizens like those in Silicon Valley with poorer, less educated people in the nation’s interior. However, a recent request for help on the website PrimalSurvivor read, “I do not have a stable income due to rural village life and can not seem to find a shelter I could afford to protect my two sons.”

The Survival Condo Project’s residents include self-made businesspeople, wealthy doctors, and an architect, but nobody in finance. One financial advisor, a middle-age man in the mid-South, admitted to being a prepper, but spoke on condition of anonymity because he said that his firm, a national brokerage house, wouldn’t appreciate publicity of this kind. The advisor said he had picked up more business than he’d lost since revealing his views to his clients seven years ago. They appreciate his foresight and his recommendations, he says, which include buying three months of food as well as some gold, silver, and a pump-action shotgun.

“We just have a slight little edge if things were to go bad,” he says, “whether it’s an ice storm, a volcano, an outbreak of racial tension, or a fat finger on Wall Street.”

Hall began to think about buying a bunker about a dozen years ago, when he was working for the U.S. government as a software engineer on various classified projects, some of which involved disaster preparedness. In 2008, he paid $300,000 for the defunct missile silo and pumped more than one million gallons of rainwater out of it and roughly $20 million of improvements into it using a combination of his own capital and a loan from the seller. All of the 12 fee-simple condos have sold, and Hall figures he has broken even on the project. He’s developing a second, larger ICBM site 30 miles north, and he’s thinking of working on a third missile silo near Lake Placid, N.Y. “That one should sell well,” he says. “Location, location, location.”

Hall is a big guy with a large presence, a natural ringmaster; his partner, Menosky, is both smaller physically and more subdued. Together, they make a good team. They met in Florida in the mid-2000s, shortly after Hurricanes Wilma and Katrina, and they discovered they shared twin passions. One was planning for Teotwawki, the prepper acronym for the end of the world as we know it. It is pronounced “tay-oh-twa-ki,” like some long-lost native American Plains tribe. Their other shared obsession was solving technical and engineering problems. Menosky is particularly fond of the silo’s reverse-osmosis water-filtration system (“It’s so good, we have to add the minerals back in,” he says), while Hall loves the Donaldson Torit Cyclone, which will filter the air should the Yellowstone volcano spew its four to six feet of expected ash.

The bunker is 201 feet high and measures 52 feet across. Nobody lives permanently on site now; there’s an airstrip eight miles away that the owners can fly into. During much of the tour, it’s easy to forget that you’re inside an underground nuclear-hardened site built for Teotwawki. Hall’s pitch is as smooth as any Manhattan real estate broker’s, and there’s lots of patter about closet space and high-end appliances. A full-floor condo has three bedrooms and 1,840 square feet, and sold for $2.5 million. “You could put a king in here,” Hall says, as we step into one bedroom, “but we just went with a queen. It’s your choice.”

Originally, Hall and Menosky had designed the condo as typical engineers, but midway through the project, they hired someone who caused them to rethink the development in several important ways. This was a psychologist, a woman who had worked on Biosphere 2, the early-1990s experiment that put people together in a contained space for more than two years. It wasn’t enough to have well-appointed residences reinforced with nine-feet concrete walls, she told them. If the silo’s inhabitants were going to get to the other side of the apocalypse, Hall and Menosky were going to have to create a functioning, organic community. “Where are the common areas?” she asked as they reviewed the original blueprints. “Where’s your bar, where’s your Whole Foods, where’s your
Starbucks
? People will get cabin fever down here. You have to normalize life.”

Photograph by TJ Proechel

So Hall built a bar on the 14th floor, and there’s a swimming pool several floors above it. There’s also a gym, a weight room, and a movie theater with a popcorn maker. The library—“our Starbucks,” Hall says—has built-in maple bookshelves that wrap around the silo’s curved walls. Originally designed with a naval vessel in mind, the food storeroom has been transformed into a supermarket with carts for residents to push along the aisles stocked with toothbrushes and cotton balls. Hall has laid in three to five years of dried and canned goods, but there’s also a counter labeled Fish Market, which will be supplied by a combined aquaculture and hydroponics ecosystem that takes up two floors of the silo. Menosky and Hall refer to it as their aquaponics facility, because the excrement of live fish will be used to nitrify produce like strawberries and kale.

The condo owners have 19 children among them, so at the psychologist’s suggestion, Hall built a modern classroom and installed a whiteboard and large
Apple
computers. The plan is for grades K-6 to attend school in the morning, while grades 7-12 come in the afternoon. Parents will teach as part of their normal monthly work rotation. Once the second silo to the north is operational, Hall says he’ll set up a video link to allow the children living in both facilities to communicate, “so they don’t feel alone.”

Down in the bunker, the machinery hums quietly in the background. Thanks to Hall and Menosky’s engineering, it’s obvious that all is in order. The library’s maple bookshelves smell nice, and the classroom feels like any other classroom in any other upper-middle-class school—neat, clean, and regulated. I can imagine children sitting there while their parents shop upstairs in the grocery store or work in the hydroponic garden. Then Hall asks, “Do you want to see the jail cell?”

Photograph by TJ Proechel

According to the psychologist, Hall needed to follow the idea of building a new community through to its logical conclusion, which included the likelihood that some of the silo’s occupants will misbehave. “There will be anxiety over events outside the bunker,” Hall remembers her saying. “People will get drunk; they will get belligerent. You will need tasers for them and a safe place to put them.” The cell looks ordinary: a small white room with a cot and a stainless-steel toilet jutting out from the wall. When I ask Hall how the justice system will be constituted, he has a ready answer: The head of security will serve as the police chief, with residents acting as deputies as part of their regular work rotation. The condo board will serve as judge and jury.

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There are more than a dozen security guards on staff, all of them ex-military. Only two will live inside the silo when it goes into lockdown mode. The rest have their own bunkers, Hall says. The two guards who remain will be responsible not only for keeping the peace inside but also for manning the crow’s nest, the only place in the silo that’s exposed to the elements. From the crow’s nest, one can survey the vast prairie in all directions, and while standing there, it’s easy to believe you’re in almost the exact center of the continental U.S. The security team will be able to deploy drones from the crow’s nest for what Hall calls “reconnaissance capability.” The team members will also be able to pick off marauders who may approach the silo looking for food and shelter.

Neither Hall nor Menosky indulge in any grand fantasy that once it’s safe to re-emerge, their band of survivors will become like Adam and Eve, creating a new and better human race. From this point of view, prepping is simply a modern, secular variant of Pascal’s Wager: The penalty for believing and being wrong is a lot smaller than the penalty for not believing and being wrong. Besides, prepping is a decent business proposition. Depending on the options included, Hall figures he can clear roughly $10 million if his second missile-silo project sells out. The new one will be bigger, and will house a driving range and a bowling alley. He has a couple of live buyers for the entire bunker, including a group from the United Arab Emirates that recently toured the existing site.

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